- November 13, 2020
There are always rumors floating around that developers and testers struggle to meet targets which often leads to delayed releases and longer crunch times. This is nothing new in the industry and will not come as a surprise to many. This is according to a survey by Diffblue who discovered that financial services firms are paying £14,843 each year per developer for writing unit tests. According to the study, the companies had an average of 43 developers employed. This results in unit testing costing over £600,000 a year.
Vanson Bourne was the agency responsible for conducting the survey. The survey consisted of 300 participants. 200 in the United States and the final 100 in the United Kingdom. Consisting of people who work in software development, Dev-Ops, and application development in sub executive positions at companies that have at least 500 employees. Regardless of the large amounts of funds being spent on unit testing, the results of the survey didn’t provide pleasing statistics. It found that 43% of developers struggle to meet testing targets set by their superiors. As a consequence, results will not equal funding.
The key benefits of unit testing it to identify any unintended changes in the code early. It was discovered that 90% of developers in financial services believe that they need to improve software quality with better testing. Also, 49% believe their organisation suffers an increased cost of fixing errors due to poor software quality.
Missing Targets
Nobody wants poor software quality. It will negatively impact your business goals. As a result of the huge cost of development in financial services you would imagine that the software quality would be excellent. Whereas, customers expect a high level of quality. Obviously security is a big factor as well. As long as it doesnt become breached at any time customers can still have faith in the quality of your services.
Other problems within FinTech revolve around tight schedules and targeting. Here are the top three reasons why deelopers believe the software quality is below standard:
- Insufficient software testing (46%)
- Unrealistic schedules (40%)
- Excessive manual processes (39%)
Now, if these are the problems lets ask the important question. How do we fix them? 47% believe automated testing could help solve the problem. Also 46% believe moving to more test-driven development would be effective. It is crucial for financial services catching bugs early. Obviously catching bugs early will lead to better software being delivered.
Unit testing if very useful for catching bugs early. As a result you do not miss unintentional code changes. However, it is taking a signifigant amount of time. It has been established that testers are struggling to meet their targets in several areas. This includes unit testing and even new feature development. It may be possible to improve user testing by using software collaboration services. There is more information available on it here. A result of software collaboration could help hitting targets on time.